Thinking big on both sides of the Broadway Bridge

Broadway and Fremont bridges (Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

"They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway," the old song goes, referring to another more famous Broadway, in New York City. "They say there's always magic in the air." The ensuing lyrics then take a turn: "But when you're walkin' down that street/and you ain't had enough to eat/the glitter rubs right off and you're nowhere."

The song was first a hit for The Drifters in 1963, and evoked both the romance of New York as well as the destitution its citizens saw (and still see) every day amidst the wealth. Today in Portland we're grappling with this same dichotomy: how to fulfill our sense that this is or can be a great city, with ambitious landmarks and big plans, creative artistry and great coffee all around, yet without diverting our attention away from the increasing ranks of the needy and homeless.

And the central-city span that shares its name with that more famous NYC street and song, the Broadway Bridge, seems to be a place where this undetermined future of Portland is coming together, ripening with density yet in need of holistic thinking to make our city-building equitable. Most all Broadways are prominent streets in their respective cities, and ours is no different. How many other streets touch Northwest, Southwest and Northeast at once? It makes sense to reach across the river and create a vision for sides of Broadway together.

In a column last week for the Portland Tribune, I looked at a collection of potential developments along both sides of the Broadway Bridge (and its namesake street) along with the attendant need to think about these opportunities collectively. That holistic approach seemed to be a hallmark of Portland's downtown transformation in the 1970s, but it has given way a few decades later to a series of silos that get addressed one by one, and without consideration for how each reinforces the other. Today we are in the process of finalizing the Central City 2035 plan, but I'm talking about a kind of urban design and collective thinking that's neither at that 30,000-foot view nor right at the street level: one that's wide enough to see how key pieces of the central-city land fit together and reinforce each other.

Whomever the next mayor of Portland turns out to be, or in case our current one wants to go out with a bang, here's hoping he or she will bring forth a vision for how these different pieces will come together, especially on the east side of the Broadway Bridge, where the combined Lloyd District, Rose Quarter and Northeast Broadway is forming an eventual second downtown.

On the west side of the Willamette River, the Broadway Bridge touches down where Old Town/Chinatown meets the Pearl District. Here we recently saw completion of the Pacific Northwest College of Art's new home at 511 Broadway, and a series of new building projects are to come such as a new Multnomah County Health Department headquarters. But the really significant puzzle piece, of course, is the US Postal Service facility at NW Glisan an Broadway, which the City of Portland recently purchased from the letter carriers for $88 million, thereby freeing up these 13.4 acres for redevelopment. The land could become one big corporate headquarters, adding significantly to the tax rolls, or this superblock could be broken back down into a grid of 200-by-200-foot blocks. Or both.

The soon-to-be-vacated downtown post office (Portland Tribune)

Yet the adjacent Old Town is also a reminder of the challenges our city faces, and it's not enough to revitalize the district with luxury apartments and condos. The neighborhood hosts more than its fair share of social service agencies, and so we see the long lines for meals and the increasing numbers of encampments both here and in Waterfront Park near the Broadway and Steel bridges. Yet how might we envision the USPS site in a way that enhances Old Town, or the land across the river?

To the northwest of the Broadway Bridge is where the greatest amount of residential development is happening, in the northern Pearl District between the Fremont Bridge, the river and I-405, specifically just south of the Fremont. Here projects like the Abigail Apartments, Modera Pearl, and heretofore unnamed buildings like Block 26, Block 20 and Block 17 are in various stages of design and construction.

What are all these tall buildings looking out at? Centennial Mills, the historic riverfront flour and seed mill that is practically the birthplace of Portland, where our biggest export for more than 150 years, wheat, was packaged and shipped out so successfully that it once made Portland the third-richest American city after New York and Chicago. For over a decade there have been efforts made to restore the key historic mill buildings and create riverfront open space. But now the city is tearing down almost all of the development, and after years of talking the mayor and venerable developer Jordan Schnitzer were not able to come to an agreement. Instead of talking about what the Centennial Mills site should be, and how this open space can benefit residents on both sides of the river as part of a broader vision, we're all shaking our heads seeing these historic buildings decimated. Perhaps worst of all, the Portland Police Bureau has backed away from its promise to give up its riverfront horse paddock there, making any other development vision at Centennial Mills compromised.

The east side of the Broadway Bridge is where the really big transformation could and should happen, but so far there has not been a real vision championed. First, there are two big transit happenings. A new streetcar line is connecting the Pearl with Northeast Broadway, and streetcars are development tools more than transit. The Oregon Department of Transportation is also reconfiguring the nearby Rose Quarter exit of I-5, including a partial cap of a wider roadway.

What do you see when you come off the Broadway Bridge on the east side? To the left, you see mostly vacant lots and low-density buildings such as a self-storage facility, but which someday, if we don't screw it up, will be part of a thriving, pedestrian and transit-oriented mixed-use area. You also find a block to the north the massive but low-rise Portland Public Schools facility, which PPS has never officially stated a desire to leave but which has been at least whispered about for many years as a redevelopment opportunity, including Mayor Adams' efforts to bring a Costco there in 2011. If we're talking about the potential of the USPS site across the river now, we'll probably be talking about the PPS site down the road. But no local leader I've yet encountered has discussed how these two big parcels might work together as part of one vision encompassing both sides of the river.

Coming off the Broadway bridge on the east side and looking to the right, you see a riverfront parcel on the former Thunderbird Motel site that is being used as a parking lot for Rose Quarter employees. You see a surface parking lot immediately north of Memorial Coliseum, and just east of that two parking garages that on one hand provide easy parking during Moda Center and Coliseum events but act like a black hole for urban vitality the rest of the time. The Rose Quarter district is perhaps Portland's biggest urban-planning disaster area, but the problem isn't the two arenas: it's the garages that act as a barrier between the Rose Quarter and Broadway. Imagine if a king wanted to invite the public into his castle, and he wondered why in the world everyone was stopping at the mote. Luckily those garages are designed to withstand buildings on top of them. But no action has been taken to begin to redevelop these parcels or even to craft a vision or master plan for how we might do so, and how those redevelopments might be part of a collected effort. We also have never spent much time thinking about how the Oregon Convention Center can work in tandem with the Coliseum, or how a Convention Center hotel might factor in to plans for the Rose Quarter and Broadway.

If one thinks of Northeast Broadway along with the combined Rose Quarter, Convention Center and Lloyd District, beside the lack of collective vision, the glaring omission to the mixed-use puzzle is housing, but that has started to arrive in a big way in the Lloyd, with massive developments like Hassalo on Eighth and Oregon Square. For decades this section of town, like the Rose Quarter, has seemed dead much of the time, but housing will change that. Yet we don’t have much in terms of affordable and homeless housing in the Lloyd District.

A 2015 rendering of the planned Convention Center hotel (City of Portland)

But how will all these pieces, as well as the numerous surface parking lots and parking garages on the east side of the bridge, come together? I’d like to see local leaders talk about a collective vision for how opportunities like the USPS site, the Rose Quarter and the Convention Center and its hotel will work symbiotically. So far that’s been lacking.

As I wrote in last week’s column, the challenge we face in imagining the Northwest Portland riverfront and the burgeoning Lloyd-Rose Quarter-Broadway combined area is reminiscent of one the city faced four decades ago, when ’70s Portland began transforming its downtown with a host of transit, business and green-space efforts: TriMet’s Transit Mall, Tom McCall Waterfront Park, and Pioneer Courthouse Square.

These projects helped set in motion the addition of retail and cultural landmarks like Nordstrom’s flagship store, the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, and the Portland Center for the Performing Arts. These investments eventually led to the addition of some 30,000 jobs in the downtown core. But the key was that each map-move reinforced the other, and that was by design.

I'd love to hear a Portland leader say, "I'm not just thinking about the Convention Center hotel, or the post office site, or the Coliseum, or Old Town, or even just about affordable housing. I have a vision about how to build a thriving mixed-use, mixed-income city, out of many disparate parts. I'm thinking about placemaking, but not just in terms of individual places. I want to connect the dots."

Comments

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That 2010 rendering is such an uninspiring vision. Where's the density? There should be highrises there on par with the other development in Lloyd right now. You have MAX, streetcar, two interstates, bike lanes, and can even walk into downtown, and they want to use this parcel for what looks like four-story apartments and a strip mall?

Brian--spot on. We are in much need of a coherent urban design framework-especially relating to recent PDC projects. BDS may counter "the Green Loop" is that unifying element to organize the various areas and projects in your list. I'm not completely convinced but I look forward to the proposed design challenge to help illuminate its potential.

Very happy that you included the Blanchard site in this post because it brings up the opportunity to recognize the failure of the City and PPS to adapt to the growth in the Pearl and NW. The entire quadrant feeds into Chapman Elementary school, which is bursting at the seams (not 'seems'). Currently, there are no SDCs for our schools and the district has no plans to build additional schools. Thier (not 'there' or 'they're') plan is to shift the boundary line and send kids up the hill to Ainsworth Elementary. (despite having a perfectly good school building located at NW 21st & Glisan, currently occupied by a special program that pulls 85% of it's kids from the east side, but that is a whole different kettle of fish)

So when the Conway blocks are built out, the Post Office blocks are fully developed and who knows how many more condos are in the Pearl, where are the kids going to go to school?

PS: a 'mote' is a tiny speck of a thing, hardly enough to stop someone from visiting a king's castle...